The highway traffic police now want the entire expressway of 94.5 kilometres including the divider, to be bordered with metallic crash barriers.

The police had also found out black spots on the expressway with steep curves, which were more prone to accidents.(HT File/Representational Image )

Although the accidents on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway have gone up in the past year, the total number of fatalities has decreased, owing to crash barriers installed on the black spots along the stretch.

Taking a note of this, the highway traffic police now want the entire expressway of 94.5 kilometres including the divider, to be bordered with metallic crash barriers.

The highway safety patrol (HSP) now want the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) to install metallic brifen ropes as they are more sturdy than the crash barriers, which break each time a vehicle hits it.

According to the HSP officers, the brifen ropes will prevent deaths.

Vijay Patil, superintendent of highway traffic police said that after a spate of accidents, they had studied the pattern and cause of the fatalities, when they found that over-speeding and sudden lane cutting were the major reasons.

The police had also found out black spots on the expressway with steep curves, which were more prone to accidents. Based on the study, the MSRDC installed crash barriers on these 11 black spots, and all of them fall between the Panvel and Lonavala stretch. They observed that in 2017, fatalities had gone down, while the number of injured had increased.

“We had found that crash barriers had helped in reducing the number of deaths, which shifted to injuries in 2017 from 2016 due to the crash barriers,” said Patil.

According to statistics of the HSP, in 2016, 151 people died in 281 accidents on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. However, this reduced by 89 in 2017, where 105 people died in 360 accidents reported in 2017.

In 2016 around 179 people were reported injured, which rose to 191 in 2017.

The police now want the brifen ropes even on the divider of the entire stretch as many times a crashing vehicles cross the divider and hits the vehicle on the other side of the road as it turns turtle due to the speed,

“The metallic ropes on the divider will not just save the vehicle occupants, but also the commuters travelling on the other side of the road,” said Patil.